Explain a short tenure in three sentences: what you were hired to do, what changed, and what you finished before you left. The contractor is testing two things, whether you leave in the middle of a job and whether you blame other people. Answer both unprompted, name no villain, and brief your references to match.
The interviewer decided what the eleven months meant before you sat down. Resumes get read the night before, a short tenure gets circled, and a private theory forms around it: quit on a job, got run off, cannot work for anyone. Your first sentence on the subject either confirms that theory or replaces it. Most candidates confirm it, with an answer that starts two employers back and ends on someone else’s failings. The odd part is that the theory was never really about the eleven months.
What is a contractor testing when it asks about a short tenure?
Two things, and neither is loyalty. Will you leave in the middle of a job, and when a project goes wrong, do you describe it as something that was done to you? The dates only raise those questions. The way you tell the story answers them.
The first worry is practical. A project manager who walks at 60 percent complete takes the change order history, the owner’s trust and the reasons behind forty decisions out the door. Whoever inherits the job spends two months rebuilding what was in one head. A president who has lived through that once reads every short line on a resume as a possible repeat, which is why our note on resigning mid-project spends most of its length on the handover.
The second worry is about the future. An interviewer who hears you describe a disorganized former employer is not learning about that employer. He is hearing a preview of how you will describe his firm in the next interview you sit, and he is the one who will be disorganized in that version.
When is a project-length stint not a short tenure?
When the job you were hired for started, finished and closed out while you were there. Construction people follow projects, so two years on one hospital followed by a move is a completed assignment. It only reads badly when the resume hides the project behind the dates.
Other industries read tenure in years at a company. Construction reads it in jobs delivered. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes median time with an employer by industry in its tenure release, and it is worth a look before you conclude that your own history is unusual.
Here is a worked example. A project manager’s resume shows 58 months at a first contractor, then 26 months, then 11 months, then 31 months at the current firm. The 26 months were one $40 million school in Nashville, from preconstruction to closeout, after which the contractor had nothing else of that size to offer. Only the 11 needs explaining.
The fix for a project-length stint is on the page, before any interview. Put the project, its value and its stage next to the dates, so the reader sees “closed out” before he sees “26 months.” A stretch with no employer at all is a different question, and our note on the career gap covers what an interviewer is really testing there.
| What the resume shows | What the interviewer assumes | What your answer must contain |
|---|---|---|
| Eleven months, then a move | Left a job unfinished, or was pushed | The stage the job had reached, and who took it over |
| Laid off when backlog dried up | Was the weakest of those cut | How many went, and what you finished first |
| Left after a project went bad | Caused it, or ran from it | What you controlled, and what you did about it |
| Followed a former boss | Loyal to a person, will leave again | What the new role offered that the old one could not |
| Two years, one project | Nothing, if the project is named | The closeout |
A real short stint, the 11 in the example, needs more than formatting.
How do you explain a short tenure in three sentences?
Say what you were hired to do, what changed, and what you finished before you left. Then stop talking. Each sentence should be checkable by someone who was there, and none of them should need an adjective about another person.
Here is the layoff version. “I was hired to run the firm’s second healthcare job in Houston. The owner’s financing stalled, the job was shelved, and the firm cut the six most recent hires across two offices. I finished the closeout on the clinic I had been covering and handed over my files.” Nobody is blamed, the cause is a business event, and there is a number a reference can confirm.
Layoffs tied to workload need no apology in this industry. Associated Builders and Contractors tracks contractor backlog month by month because it moves, and the federal JOLTS survey counts layoffs and discharges in construction separately from quits. The interviewer has laid people off for the same reason, probably in the same quarter. Our note on a construction layoff covers the first week and the severance paper that come before this interview.
The bad-project version is harder, and it is where candidates talk longest. Keep the same three parts: the condition of the job when you arrived, the one thing that was yours to fix and what you did, and the stage at which you left. Our guide to interview preparation covers how to tell a losing job in detail, and our note on the problem project sets out that answer in four moves. For the tenure question, three sentences are enough, and the interviewer will ask for more if he wants it.
What to leave out about a former employer:
- Diagnoses. “They were disorganized” and “there was no leadership” are opinions, and nobody can verify them.
- Money. A bonus dispute may be the true reason you left. Raised in the first interview, it sounds like the reason you will leave the next firm.
- Names. The superintendent you could not work with has friends, and in a metro like Atlanta one of them may be at the table.
- “Culture fit.” It is not a sentence. It is the place where a sentence should have been.
Three clean sentences still have to survive one more test, and you will not be in the room for it.
What your references will be asked
A reference call about a short stint skips the small talk. Expect four questions: whose decision the departure was, what stage the job had reached, whether you left it in order, and whether the firm would hire you again. Our piece on reference checks describes the same call from the contractor’s chair.
Your three sentences and your reference’s account need to match on facts, not on wording. Call the person at that employer who will tell it straight, say what you plan to say, and ask whether they remember it the same way. If they do not, you want to learn that from them, not from a rejection. After a layoff, ask the firm for one written line confirming a reduction in force. It costs them nothing and it ends the discussion.
If nobody at that employer will speak for you, say so before anyone asks, and offer the owner’s representative or the architect from the same job. A missing reference that you flagged looks like candor. A missing reference that the contractor discovers looks like the theory he started with.
Would it help to say the three sentences aloud to someone who hears how contractors react to them? Selah Talent Partners works on confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, for contractors across the United States, and a candidate never pays for that conversation, which begins on the candidates page.
The interviewer wrote his version of the eleven months the night before. You get three sentences to edit it, and he checks every one.
Sources and further reading
- Tenure release, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Tenure
- Backlog, Associated Builders and Contractors, Construction Backlog Indicator
- JOLTS survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey